1951 Shelby, North Carolina

William Herbert Kouri

Born 1935

Shelby, North Carolina

Interviewed on February 8, 2023

by Kyle Mayer

As I was growing up, Shelby, North Carolina has four theaters. Two of them were considered A-grade and the other two were considered D-grade. We tended to go to the D-grade ones the most growing up. We didn’t see favorite movies there, but I would receive an allowance of about 25 cents per week and with that quarter I could go to the movie and get popcorn and Coca-Cola. The movie was about a mile away and we tended to walk or my father could drop us off. The crowd was usually my brother and myself. We would usually see a Western—oftentimes a double-header Western—with Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, or Tim Hope. These were the leading two-bit Western stars of the period. After the movie, my brother and I (and our other friends) would walk home. The other two theaters were the upscale ones. They did not have these two-bit Westerns on the weekends; they would go ahead and get the releases from Hollywood, whether it was 20th Century or Warner or MGM. These movies we tended to go to at night with our parents or over the weekend if they were screening a special movie.

There were two movies growing up that I really, truly enjoyed, and both of them did make an impression on me that I carried forward. I’ll talk to you about the one that probably had the greatest impression: The Great Caruso. The movie was filmed in the late 40s or the early 50s. It had Mario Lanza as the lead role. I think I was probably with my brother at the time and maybe a friend, John Connor. The reason the movie made such a great appeal to me is that it was the story of Enrico Caruso, who was probably, up until recently, considered the greatest tenor of all time. The songs in the movie were very inspiring. They were in Latin or Italian except for “The Loveliest Night of the Year.” Since it was the story of an Italian opera singer, the operas came from Pagliacci, Rigoletto, Aida, and Tosca. It was just so moving to me that I became interested in opera which I carried forward for the rest of my life. No one in my family was interested in opera. The music was just so appealing to me, so thrilling to me, so beautiful to me, that it led to a lifetime interest in opera and my purchasing as many arias as I could. At that time we were purchasing them on 45s. They had the old 78, but the 45 was a smaller, more compact, more durable type of record.

As I remember it, the plot followed a young lad growing up in Italy. There was an early scene in the movie where he was in a chorus and his voice was just soaring. As a result of that, he was chosen to attend special classes to further train his voice. After a certain length of time, he was able to qualify for several opera roles in Italy. Slowly, he was able to increase his fame to the point where he performed in Milan’s great opera house, La Scala. He was able to scale that wall before coming to New York to sing at the Metropolitan. The story also shows his interest in romance; he married his wife after returning to New York from his tour. Ultimately, at the end of the movie, he develops cancer of the larynx and he starts hemorrhaging while he’s singing. That becomes his last opera. Beginning after the Metropolitan performance, there was about a 20-year period where the film showed his success traveling about the United States and Europe singing some of these beautiful arias. Probably the one that was most thrilling to me was “Vesti la guibba” from Pagliacci. It had a profound effect on me and led to my interest in opera. Caruso was just the greatest. He also did something unusual: he was able to record records while the record industry was coming into itself around 1900. The recordings weren’t good, but the sales were. He was able to enjoy a lucrative life because of the sales of his records and the salary he received from his performances. He was well sought out throughout the world. The movie ended very shortly after he had his hemorrhage on stage.

I saw The Great Caruso at the Rogers Theater, one of the A-grade ones. The other first-class theater was called the State Theater. The remaining theaters were the Carolina Theater and the Webb Theater. The Carolina Theater was the most popular one because of the Westerns that it had on the weekends, often a double-header. That tended to attract many adolescents and pre-adolescent children in the Shebly area. The Webb theater was just a run-down theater. Growing up, we would usually go to the movies weekly because of the Westerns. The other movies that we would see, such as The Great Caruso, constituted a special occasion. We’d probably have bypassed the Saturday performance at the Carolina Theater and gone instead to the Rogers Theater. Our parents would sometimes take us at night to make the six or seven o’clock performance.